Is this the end?

[ianann]

Gwent shifted from an at least half-way intelligent strategy game to a toxic, braindead meta over the years. I still play it but only to annoy the shit out of netdeck players with my custom homebrewn neutral decks. It's a shame and I hope the game dies. 18 out of 20 matches are just plain, stupid repetition of frost, nauzicaa sergeant, spies, vampires or completely OP Skellige and it gets even more toxic with every card drop.

 

[UMA22]

So why are they trying to sell new stuff when they officially end their support for the game in near future? Is this some sort of "Give me some money on my way out" case? No we end the development of this game beyond 2023. But... hey gimme some money! I'll send you a postcard or something

The games is not going to be stopped just no more new journey, and no more new cards after 2024 there's still new cards for 2023 and balancing patches

 

[Fargothwave]

The end began a long time ago.

The second CDPR decided to up the ante with the point generation. Master Mirror was the last (comparatively) reasonable expansion, but even then, it marked the end of the "standard" provisions-to-points ratio. Some new cards seriously deviated from it, and predictably, it only got worse over the next few years.

Another problem was that - as some here might remember- instead of really solving the core issue with then-overpowered poison, they just introduced a rather scuffed counter-mechanic in Veil. This weird kind of balancing where you just ignore the key problem and "solve" in with some makeshift crutch would then happen again and again, and persists to this day. For example when removal got out of hand really bad, many new cards started to create more than 1 body (nothing was done to help the old ones, though), and then came new, better removal cards to keep up with those ad nauseam Renfri. They balanced themselves into a corner like that.

And after a certain point there was no longer an option to go back.
Of course, they could've realised that say, Eist or maybe even more "innocent" ones like Oneiromancy or Harald were too much and should go back whence they came, but instead CDPR decided to double down, giving everyone the big guns to "balance" them out (never actually making sure the guns were the same size or safe/conditional enough), thus making hundreds of old cards hopelessly obsolete and increasing the impact of random on the outcome of any given match.

No wonder the game has been bleeding players hard, it hasn't been fair or diverse for years. I believe Jean even blamed the lack of deck diversity on the players at one point - which IIRC happened during the Tunnel Drill meta. Contemplate this.

Lack of good marketing -at any stage! - didn't help either.

And we kept hoping, but our prayers were left unanswered and occasionally mocked - and this is the end result. The game that had every chance and right to become the best CCG on every level, by far, was ruined and now comes to its bitter, bitter end. Don't get your hopes for the "community balancing" high - there isn't much of a community left, and the game is beyond repair at this point, as described above. Might as well go back to Merchants of Ofier and try again.

 

[ReaperTek]

Good, can we now finally get a unsupported playable Open Beta Version released on GOG again because that one is imho much more worth preserving than the current mobile Card Game abomination.

 

[BartonFink]

Another problem was that - as some here might remember- instead of really solving the core issue with then-overpowered poison, they just introduced a rather scuffed counter-mechanic in Veil. This weird kind of balancing where you just ignore the key problem and "solve" in with some makeshift crutch would then happen again and again, and persists to this day.

This aspect interests me, as someone who used to almost exclusively play a Nil poison deck in ranked games. I didn't netdeck but before one of my cards got nerfed I would say that the poison mechanic was good but it never let me dominate everything. Why nerf it? When I came across decks that nullified my deck by nature or by design (as in decks tailored to nullify a poison deck) I didn't complain about those decks or mechanics beating my preferred deck, demanding that the devs make changes which suited my favourite deck.

Maybe dev changes like that is part of the problem? People with a favoured deck hate their deck having counters and demand changes, giving us the current state of play as far as faction balance goes? How do you think an unnerfed poision deck would fare today? I'm pretty sure it would get regularly crushed.

Poison didn't deserve to get nerfed. There are some factions which had mechanics which easily nullified the poison mechanic. Other decks could have units or effects which frustrated the poison strategy.

So, I imagine that the poison haters are happy now. They want their favourite deck to give them endless growth and for their units to have impunity, as in Immunity etc. Now, isn't that fun? THEY get to have THEIR deck super-buffed and not have any counters whilst MY preferred deck is crippled because of a few people having a hissy fit because my kind of deck maybe had an edge over their preferred deck. Like rotating their faction or deck is waaay too much trouble for them. Easier to get the devs to do their dirty work for them.

I've said on this board in the past on numerous occasions that the Nil poison deck wasn't that big of a problem and the subsequent metas are infinitely worse. And whilst nerfing the Nil poison strategy, why not just let Syn have a poison mechanic that poisons their opponent's entire board and kills all their units in one play? FFS.

 

[Fargothwave]

This aspect interests me, as someone who used to almost exclusively play a Nil poison deck in ranked games. I didn't netdeck but before one of my cards got nerfed I would say that the poison mechanic was good but it never let me dominate everything. Why nerf it? When I came across decks that nullified my deck by nature or by design (as in decks tailored to nullify a poison deck) I didn't complain about those decks or mechanics beating my preferred deck, demanding that the devs make changes which suited my favourite deck.

And back then there were many people who felt the same way, too. And sure enough "just play wide" was something of a meme around here.

But let me tell you something - that's about the only thing you could do. There were just too many cheap instances of poison - and then VVM and possibly Invo for a good measure. And decks that didn't go wide would often end the game with 5-10 points (against 40 to 60 of NG side). I didn't ever think - definitely don't now - that it was okay.

And trust me, I did try to build a dedicated deck with enough purification, but in was never enough -not with Gremist, not even with the old Clear Skies and a defender. The only thing that could keep up was either unitless SC (which I've always hated with passion) or infinite Diviners assimilate meme, which is how I survived the Double Ball meta and didn't ragequit the game. But NG poison was still strongly favored against everything not designed to counter it (and things that countered it tended to be bad against other meta decks of that period). Additionally, Joachim/Roderic shenanigans allowed you to trigger 2 instances of poison the same turn, which was just outrageous and decidedly non-interactive.

Speaking of Joachim shenanigs, a later version of poison spam deck, the infamous Chinese Metabreaker, was even more toxic than that, and again on the account of spammable cheap removal (and with some crazy pointslam on top of that this time)

Maybe dev changes like that is part of the problem? People with a favoured deck hate their deck having counters and demand changes, giving us the current state of play as far as faction balance goes? How do you think an unnerfed poision deck would fare today? I'm pretty sure it would get regularly crushed.

That's not how it happend, though. They did, in fact, target the OP decks and not the underdogs, based on their performance - and Double Ball performed ridiculously well even in prorank. I won't give you numbers off the top of my head, but I remember something like 57% in prorank during its peak, which is a stupidly high number.

It's just HOW they went about nerfing overpowered archetypes was far from optimal , not to mention always taking too long to implement. Tunnel Drilling was allowed to continue for several months.

Poison didn't deserve to get nerfed. There are some factions which had mechanics which easily nullified the poison mechanic. Other decks could have units or effects which frustrated the poison strategy.

Yes it did. Yes, counters existed. And yet poison made use of engines/strong boosts in general and tall MO/SK in particular nearly impossible, all on its own. Think about it - not being able to use the whole CLASS of cards because of a single mechanic. You go tall, you lose. That's just stupid and restrictive for the game as a whole. No mechanic should ever be a complete, hopeless counter. especially not to so many things at once.

So, I imagine that the poison haters are happy now. They want their favourite deck to give them endless growth and for their units to have impunity, as in Immunity etc. Now, isn't that fun? THEY get to have THEIR deck super-buffed and not have any counters whilst MY preferred deck is crippled because of a few people having a hissy fit because my kind of deck maybe had an edge over their preferred deck. Like rotating their faction or deck is waaay too much trouble for them. Easier to get the devs to do their dirty work for them.

No, they aren't happy now - probably don't even play the game anymore. And I alluded to why in my first post - people wanted it directly nerfed, but nobody asked to do that by adding crazy engines going into hundreds evenly split among several bodies. But that's exactly how the balance team (mis)handled the whole issue with easy spammable removal, by creating overwhelming spammable engines that were exactly as toxic and that I hated exactly as much. Should've just hit SK pointslam and NG poison directly.

(Evil is evil. If I am to choose between old Double Ball and 2021 Relicts...I'd rather not choose at all )

Oh, by the way, the original Ball archetype nerfs weren't even heavy enough to make it fall out of meta on their own - rather, it was killed off by these new cards. And even thenl, it happened much later than it should have - after aforementioned Chinese Metabreaker reared its ugly horse head.

Besides, there is a serious flaw in your logic here. Why should those engine-abusers have "just rotated" and not you? After all, back then engines weren't choking the game the way poison did. That wouldn't happen until at least Way of the Witcher. And even then were a lot more counterable than removal spam, so it seemed all the more reasonable to nerfs your favorite, not theirs.

I've said on this board in the past on numerous occasions that the Nil poison deck wasn't that big of a problem

No, it was. For the reason given above

and the subsequent metas are infinitely worse.

Yes, they were. For the reason given above.

And whilst nerfing the Nil poison strategy, why not just let Syn have a poison mechanic that poisons their opponent's entire board and kills all their units in one play? FFS.

Ah, yes, the Salamander. But that was in WotW, and by WotW they had stopped even pretending to care about reasonable balancing, so the only proper answer to your question is "because they could" (alternatively, "swingy cards are exciting!" as told by Slama back when people were mad about Eist)

 

[Jannay]

I'll play Gwent as long as they will continue to maintain servers. For me it's not the end.

 

[265feral]

There's quite a bit of negativity here towards the devs approach to cards and metas. I think they did OK, all being told. Homecoming was a shock to begin with but it was a massive improvement IMO. I liked the card drops. I like the current state of the game. Yes, it's had metas over the years that I was frustrated with (Gold immunity, Dorfs, no-unit ST, Renfri everything, etc) but look where we are now. I love the fact that I really don't know what I'm going to play against - each faction has a number of decks that they can use and I think the devs should be celebrated for managing to get to this point. Some of you will disagree and that's OK, I get it, a lot of your points are valid, I won't argue too much because I'm not as well informed or quite frankly as smart as you guys. The devs are big boys and girls, they can take criticism and I'm pretty sure in private they'd mumble agreement about some of your points even if they can't say it in public. They might even change things a bit between now and armageddon. You never know. Hope springs eternal.
But that wasn't really the thrust of my thread. This thread is about how I feel about things ending and perhaps an outlet for you all to express how you also feel about things ending. Call it cathartic. And I feel sad. I still feel sad, even days after. the announcement. Come wallow in misery with me.
If you want to discuss where things went wrong then create a seperate thread for it - you'll get plenty of people adding to it (myself included, no doubt). It'll probably be a long one.
And Jannay - I'm with you. I might not play as much post-2023 but if there are people out there still willing to play the game then I'll probably keep firing up Gwent until I can't find "a worthy rival". Who knows, you might play against me one day - I might not be worthy but I'll try to be adequate.

 

[BartonFink]

And back then there were many people who felt the same way, too. And sure enough "just play wide" was something of a meme around here.

But let me tell you something - that's about the only thing you could do. There were just too many cheap instances of poison - and then VVM and possibly Invo for a good measure. And decks that didn't go wide would often end the game with 5-10 points (against 40 to 60 of NG side). I didn't ever think - definitely don't now - that it was okay.

And trust me, I did try to build a dedicated deck with enough purification, but in was never enough -not with Gremist, not even with the old Clear Skies and a defender. The only thing that could keep up was either unitless SC (which I've always hated with passion) or infinite Diviners assimilate meme, which is how I survived the Double Ball meta and didn't ragequit the game. But NG poison was still strongly favored against everything not designed to counter it (and things that countered it tended to be bad against other meta decks of that period). Additionally, Joachim/Roderic shenanigans allowed you to trigger 2 instances of poison the same turn, which was just outrageous and decidedly non-interactive.

Speaking of Joachim shenanigs, a later version of poison spam deck, the infamous Chinese Metabreaker, was even more toxic than that, and again on the account of spammable cheap removal (and with some crazy pointslam on top of that this time)

That's not how it happend, though. They did, in fact, target the OP decks and not the underdogs, based on their performance - and Double Ball performed ridiculously well even in prorank. I won't give you numbers off the top of my head, but I remember something like 57% in prorank during its peak, which is a stupidly high number.

It's just HOW they went about nerfing overpowered archetypes was far from optimal , not to mention always taking too long to implement. Tunnel Drilling was allowed to continue for several months.

Yes it did. Yes, counters existed. And yet poison made use of engines/strong boosts in general and tall MO/SK in particular nearly impossible, all on its own. Think about it - not being able to use the whole CLASS of cards because of a single mechanic. You go tall, you lose. That's just stupid and restrictive for the game as a whole. No mechanic should ever be a complete, hopeless counter. especially not to so many things at once.


No, they aren't happy now - probably don't even play the game anymore. And I alluded to why in my first post - people wanted it directly nerfed, but nobody asked to do that by adding crazy engines going into hundreds evenly split among several bodies. But that's exactly how the balance team (mis)handled the whole issue with easy spammable removal, by creating overwhelming spammable engines that were exactly as toxic and that I hated exactly as much. Should've just hit SK pointslam and NG poison directly.

(Evil is evil. If I am to choose between old Double Ball and 2021 Relicts...I'd rather not choose at all )

Oh, by the way, the original Ball archetype nerfs weren't even heavy enough to make it fall out of meta on their own - rather, it was killed off by these new cards. And even thenl, it happened much later than it should have - after aforementioned Chinese Metabreaker reared its ugly horse head.

Besides, there is a serious flaw in your logic here. Why should those engine-abusers have "just rotated" and not you? After all, back then engines weren't choking the game the way poison did. That wouldn't happen until at least Way of the Witcher. And even then were a lot more counterable than removal spam, so it seemed all the more reasonable to nerfs your favorite, not theirs.

No, it was. For the reason given above

Yes, they were. For the reason given above.

Ah, yes, the Salamander. But that was in WotW, and by WotW they had stopped even pretending to care about reasonable balancing, so the only proper answer to your question is "because they could" (alternatively, "swingy cards are exciting!" as told by Slama back when people were mad about Eist)

I'm not a nerd about the game so I can't say that "the Chinese metabreaker" rings a bell. Don't think that I had the double ball ability either. The Puffball, I think it's called, nerf was a big nerf for me. You mentioned not being able to play tall decks. I disagree with you, and I allude to this in my last past. Just play the Mon Consume meta. Bang. That's my poison strategy out the window. It's not even designed as a counter to poison decks, it's its own thing. An opponent having a few purifying units could be a real bummer too.

Do you think that unnerfing poison decks now would kill current decks? If not, what's the problem in doing so? My deck was pretty much geared to use the ball and as many poison units and special cards as possible. Maybe I didn't crack 50% wins but at least I felt like I could be in with a chance of winning.

What you say about nerfing poison decks doesn't sound like that, it sounds more like just buffing other decks. Next time I'm in I might put up a post about what a man-child might want for their preferred deck. Spoiler alert...it already exists.

Ages ago I created a bleeding deck, hoping it might be fun and competitive. It wasn't. I've been playing a deck with the same theme recently and it has done better, at least in unranked mode. It's been years since I tried Harmony. That still a dud? If it was always a dud, what was the point in bringing it in?

Sort of related to this topic, years ago I used to play MTG on console. I used to hate playing v blue decks and when I tried playing with blue decks I can't say that I did well. Some decks in whatever card game just sit better with some players. Can't say that Syn is a good fit to me. Just sad that a competitive deck like I had with my Nil poison deck is gathering dust now.

At least we can agree that things have gotten worse since a Nil poison deck was apparently a bad thing.

 

[ThorgerWolff]

This game is in decay since WotW. Now it is just Gwent: The NG vs SK game.

Post automatically merged: Dec 10, 2022

each faction has a number of decks that they can use

Well, each faction can add Renfri, yes.

 

[Fargothwave]

I'm not a nerd about the game so I can't say that "the Chinese metabreaker" rings a bell. Don't think that I had the double ball ability either. The Puffball, I think it's called, nerf was a big nerf for me. You mentioned not being able to play tall decks. I disagree with you, and I allude to this in my last past. Just play the Mon Consume meta. Bang. That's my poison strategy out the window. It's not even designed as a counter to poison decks, it's its own thing. An opponent having a few purifying units could be a real bummer too

"Just play (whatever)" is always a bad argument to defend anything. Why should I? Matchups that leave you virtually no chance have no place in a competitive game. Favored, yes, they are inevitable and even important as they shape the meta, but hopeless ones are bad and indicative of serious problems with the game balance.

Besides, "consume" could maybe only counter a bad NG poison deck, because meta variations had no issue with losing a stack or four of poison to consume, as it had instant options, too. Nuking a three units worth of points at once? Sign me up!
Here's how it goes - poison->consume->poison->consume->poison->consume->instant 2x poison/Invo/Vincent, you get all the removal value you were denied back.

The fact that you mention Puffball, though, means that yours was probably a fun homebrew variation, and not the optimized one I have been talking about all along.

(Puffball wasn't even nerfed, btw, merely remade because it didn't really work that well in poison decks and they tried to make it fit into Madoc archetype)

Do you think that unnerfing poison decks now would kill current decks?

Of course not.

If not, what's the problem in doing so? My deck was pretty much geared to use the ball and as many poison units and special cards as possible. Maybe I didn't crack 50% wins but at least I felt like I could be in with a chance of winning.

There's no problem in doing so whatsoever. Especially with the game actually dying right there and now. Might as well bring back all kinds of monstrosities from the past, like OG Assimilate, Lockdown etc. I don't mind, as I only play the game maybe once a couple of weeks and only to have fun with some silly meme decks.

What you say about nerfing poison decks doesn't sound like that, it sounds more like just buffing other decks.

I just said what actually happened.

Perhaps my wording wasn't clear enough.
The nerfs to Masquerade Ball archetype have never been substantial (or numerous) enough to make it irrelevant or even mediocre. Not even the "non-disloyal aristocrat" clause on the Ball itself that they added after Quadruple Joachim Ball steamrolled both ranked ladder and either Open or Worlds, don't remember which one. It would always come back and be at the very least tier 2 of any given meta, which means those nerfs were, in fact, warranted and minor at that time, despite all the complaining. What really killed it off was the new unit design philosophy I've described. No doubt inspired by all the complaints about the removal, but wasn't really what anyone wanted or needed.

So yes, it wasn't nerfs that killed the Poison NG. Rather, it was the Griffin Witcher Adept, the first explicitly "control-proof" engine they created, as CDPR obviously deemed the card a succesful experiment and would proceed to print many more.

Ages ago I created a bleeding deck, hoping it might be fun and competitive. It wasn't. I've been playing a deck with the same theme recently and it has done better, at least in unranked mode. It's been years since I tried Harmony. That still a dud? If it was always a dud, what was the point in bringing it in?

Harmony used to be overpowered...a long, long time ago. And then devs just hypernerfed it and forgot about it for years. It's playable now. Not saying "good", of course. But playable.

Sort of related to this topic, years ago I used to play MTG on console. I used to hate playing v blue decks and when I tried playing with blue decks I can't say that I did well. Some decks in whatever card game just sit better with some players. Can't say that Syn is a good fit to me. Just sad that a competitive deck like I had with my Nil poison deck is gathering dust now.

"Gwent rotations"(tm)

At least we can agree that things have gotten worse since a Nil poison deck was apparently a bad thing.

It was a bad thing, same as some other bully archetypes of that time. But somehow devs decided that the solution was to replace them with even worse ones. Definitely not what I - or anyone, hopefully - wanted and hoped for.



Here's the key thing behind all my disappointment with modern Gwent that sums about everything up - back in the olden days of it, 1 provision gave you 1 point of value on average, and all the deviations from this 1:1 ratio happened only through either syngergy or indirect value, so you could conditinally make it something like 1:2 at best, if you played and built your decks well. You had to watch your sequencing really carefully, you had to combo - even if you didn't play a "combo deck" proper. So every deck and card were much more equal, and pretty much anything that wasn't a Wolf Pack could work. I, for one, made it to 2550+ SC MMR for a few seasons in a row, using my signature Movement+Dragon's Dream+Aglais homebrew, at the time when all these were considered so trash, that very few people even memed with them. But it was still possible even so! So many creative possibilites! And people used them, too, some matches I had back then would leave me wishing I could press GG another time, just to compliment the player's ingenuity.

All that ended when CDPR started printed cards whose mechanics just gave you great value regardless of your or your opponent's decisions- either without a setup whatsoever, or a setup that couldn't possibly be meaningfully disrupted by any means. And what's worse, these cards just plain had more value packed in them, both floor and cap. And I believe this direction was ultimately the thing that ruined the game.

Poison Fangs of the Empire were, technically, one such "unfair" card, by the way. Far from the most obnoxious ever printed - but still, casually getting something like 20+ value with two 4-provision units (8 body, +2/4 from Thirsty Dames, plus removal value) was virtually unheard of at that point, because the expected value for a 4-prov was something like 4-to-7, and 7 could only ever happen through synergy or super favorable use. Especially annoying because Purify costed 1 more provision on average...So, in a way, Fangs were probably the first unit to poison (sorry!) the game and violate the 1:1+n ratio in important way, even if they have never been among the worst offenders. And for a long time they remained the only bronze unit who did that - Tridam Infantry and Revenants were capable of some cute plays too, but also were a whole lot more conditional and vulnerable.

upd: I just remembered that there was another ridiculous bronze that could play way above its provisions, namely SY!Townsfolk, but those mercifully didn't have an archetype to play them in. And yeah, also quite vulnerable to locks and stuff.

 

[ThorgerWolff]

OG Assimilate, Lockdown

Bring back Death Wish and Mystic Echo!

 

[Fargothwave]

Bring back Death Wish and Mystic Echo!

Second Wind Fucusia and Tactical Retreat Terranova, just imagine! Actually, forget Fucusia, embrace omegapointslam triple Lippy baby!

 

[quintivarium]

I'm not a nerd about the game so I can't say that "the Chinese metabreaker" rings a bell. Don't think that I had the double ball ability either. The Puffball, I think it's called, nerf was a big nerf for me. You mentioned not being able to play tall decks. I disagree with you, and I allude to this in my last past. Just play the Mon Consume meta. Bang. That's my poison strategy out the window. It's not even designed as a counter to poison decks, it's its own thing. An opponent having a few purifying units could be a real bummer too.

Do you think that unnerfing poison decks now would kill current decks? If not, what's the problem in doing so? My deck was pretty much geared to use the ball and as many poison units and special cards as possible. Maybe I didn't crack 50% wins but at least I felt like I could be in with a chance of winning.

What you say about nerfing poison decks doesn't sound like that, it sounds more like just buffing other decks. Next time I'm in I might put up a post about what a man-child might want for their preferred deck. Spoiler alert...it already exists.

At least we can agree that things have gotten worse since a Nil poison deck was apparently a bad thing.

The problem is not poison; it never was poison — it alway was (and still remains) scenarios. Those cursed cards have done more to ruin the game than everything else ten times over. They are simply too many points that are too uninteractive. And because they are so strongly tied to a particular archetype, they exclude most deck variety.

What killed NG poison was not nerfs — it was power snowball (creep implies a slow process). Three years after their introduction, enough equivalently powerful — but easier to use — cards have entered the game to make scenarios less than completely dominating (except for the newer super powered ones).

 

[Barracuda88]

The problem was neither poison nor scenarios. The problem was/is/will always be the fact that no matter the meta, no matter the card drop, you face NG 30 freaking percent of the time. Not even joking.

 

[BartonFink]

"Just play (whatever)" is always a bad argument to defend anything. Why should I? Matchups that leave you virtually no chance have no place in a competitive game. Favored, yes, they are inevitable and even important as they shape the meta, but hopeless ones are bad and indicative of serious problems with the game balance.

Besides, "consume" could maybe only counter a bad NG poison deck, because meta variations had no issue with losing a stack or four of poison to consume, as it had instant options, too. Nuking a three units worth of points at once? Sign me up!
Here's how it goes - poison->consume->poison->consume->poison->consume->instant 2x poison/Invo/Vincent, you get all the removal value you were denied back.

The fact that you mention Puffball, though, means that yours was probably a fun homebrew variation, and not the optimized one I have been talking about all along.

(Puffball wasn't even nerfed, btw, merely remade because it didn't really work that well in poison decks and they tried to make it fit into Madoc archetype)

I'm not sure that I agree with your first point. Maybe some factions should have an edge over others which could be lessened or overcome with deck tweaks or your opponent not drawing well? E.g. would you balance Rock, Paper, Scissors so that one 'faction' had as much chance to beat the other 'faction'? That would have real world or fantasy world correlations too, e.g. would you really expect Syndicate to have a good chance of beating Nilfgaard in a war? Personally I wouldn't want the game to be so technical that common sense would not suffice. E.g. a poker player who knows what they're doing without being a card counter great at maths sill being able to often beat just such a poker player. That's the tension: having a static inventory vs innovation. Currently the 'innovation' seems geared to spectacle and ridiculous Marvel like superpowers. You get the spectacle of seeing your units grow wildly every turn and have Superman like units that have immunity. Like you said, such innovation should have constraints, like provision/value or whatever else functions similarly

re Devil's Puffball, even though I haven't played my poison deck for years, I think I recentlyish removed the card from my deck. From memory, before it was nerfed, it had the effect of poisoning the target and poisoning adjacent units if the primary target was destroyed. The nerf is now that it can only damage the primary by a certain amount and you have to destroy that target to poison adjacent units. That seems to restrict the primary target to low power units which aren't high value strategically to you and it's easily countered by just putting low value targets next to adjacent units. I don't know, maybe the card isn't as badly nerfed as I think it is but I didn't notice the changes and when I played the card I didn't get the result I expected so it seemed a bad nerf and I'm pretty sure I dropped the cards.

re Invo/Vincent, having a low value opponent card in your deck using Invo merely because it was very tall isn't ideal and if the last consumption got rid of the poison status, I don't see what good Vincent is (having the GWENT card database is a big help when talking to you!). Not sure what you meant by "Instant 2x poison/Invo/Vincent". I don't see how you give poison status to a unit to use those two cards if the unit with such status has been consumed.

There's no problem in doing so whatsoever. Especially with the game actually dying right there and now. Might as well bring back all kinds of monstrosities from the past, like OG Assimilate, Lockdown etc. I don't mind, as I only play the game maybe once a couple of weeks and only to have fun with some silly meme decks.

I've been playing just to work the reward trees that I want for a while now. Getting the full set of cards would now be an objective of mine. It seems to me that some old decks would still work today, like those Nor Blue Stripes summons decks for a pointslam. When I'm doing Journey or Daily challenges I'll often play decks tailored for the task and occasionally those rubbish decks win or are competitive. Can't say that I've noticed Assimilate not being a potentially powerful deck. That was nerfed? I just thought that it went out of fashion without being a dud.

Harmony used to be overpowered...a long, long time ago. And then devs just hypernerfed it and forgot about it for years. It's playable now. Not saying "good", of course. But playable.

All that ended when CDPR started printed cards whose mechanics just gave you great value regardless of your or your opponent's decisions- either without a setup whatsoever, or a setup that couldn't possibly be meaningfully disrupted by any means. And what's worse, these cards just plain had more value packed in them, both floor and cap. And I believe this direction was ultimately the thing that ruined the game.

I'm pretty sure I tried playing a Harmony deck when it first came out and it didn't seem that flash but then again, I'm not a technical player who uses spreadsheets to choose my units. I think the CT cards might buff Harmony though, so maybe it's an okay deck to play with those.

One bugbear of the new CT cards is the Nor low power unit which deals one damage every turn. Unlike the archer, they still deal damage without armour and countering them isn't something that can be done by an adaptable deck, as in you need to create a deck tailored to combat them but would no doubt be useless against other factions. During the Seasonal challenges some dominant decks made me want to tailor a deck to counter them but that hasn't generally been successful, as the end result seems to be where we are at now with the game as a whole...if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I.e. play the same deck. That's not where you want to be.

Someone had a post here about there being too many options for effects or something when it comes to an in-game choice. I argued that that philosophy should be applied, since it gives decks adaptability which could counteract any silly dev changes.

Pretty sure that one of my first posts on this board was a call for being to filter matchmaking and probably having criteria for deck selection too, as far as what can be played. I still like that idea. E.g. I'd like to try the early form of this game with 3 rows, which I didn't get to play. If I'm playing a Seasonal mode, I'd just love to be able to exclude that deck which everyone else is playing and are dominating with and when you play the same deck, it's a coin toss as to whether you win or not, depending on whether you win the toss or how you draw.

Speaking of old decks, I used to hate that Ske unit which torched units when you played them...which became just that much more loveable when it was next to that unit which protected it from any damage you wanted to deal with it. It was pretty much an "I win" play by your opponent. Don't come across that much anymore. That illustrates the problem I've mentioned before, in that do you really want to have to build a specific deck to counter a specific deck like this and which won't be good against other decks? Do you think GWENT has become more and more like this, as opposed to an earlier time, perhaps, where you could have a wide variety of decks which could play well against a wide variety of other decks?

 

[Fargothwave]

I'm not sure that I agree with your first point. Maybe some factions should have an edge over others which could be lessened or overcome with deck tweaks or your opponent not drawing well? E.g. would you balance Rock, Paper, Scissors so that one 'faction' had as much chance to beat the other 'faction'? That would have real world or fantasy world correlations too, e.g. would you really expect Syndicate to have a good chance of beating Nilfgaard in a war? Personally I wouldn't want the game to be so technical that common sense would not suffice. E.g. a poker player who knows what they're doing without being a card counter great at maths sill being able to often beat just such a poker player. That's the tension: having a static inventory vs innovation. Currently the 'innovation' seems geared to spectacle and ridiculous Marvel like superpowers. You get the spectacle of seeing your units grow wildly every turn and have Superman like units that have immunity. Like you said, such innovation should have constraints, like provision/value or whatever else functions similarly

If the game is basically won and lost in the deckbuilder, is it even a game anymore? Rock, Paper, Scissors and poker both have a psychological aspect to them, but what you propose here translates to playing RPS where you only choose the first one, and then are obligated to cycle through them in a set order. As a result, even if you would lose about much as you win, there would be no your input beyond the first round (roughly corresponding to the deckbuilding phase in my analogy). And once you learn the patterns, it will just boil down to going through motions and forfeiting after the first round. What a lame game would it be to play!

That said, many people seem to enjoy roulettes and slot machines that are dangerously close to this concept, but would they still do that if gambling didn't involve additional motivation in money, just for the sake of seeing three strawberries on their screen and a "victory" plank?

I get the realism thing, but it should always be secondary to the gameplay, otherwise you get an "interactive cinema" rather than a game.
How do I expect Syndicate to win in a war? The same way Ramsey Bolton beat Stannis. Sabotage! Might even add some audio cues for specific interactions.

re Devil's Puffball, even though I haven't played my poison deck for years, I think I recentlyish removed the card from my deck. From memory, before it was nerfed, it had the effect of poisoning the target and poisoning adjacent units if the primary target was destroyed. The nerf is now that it can only damage the primary by a certain amount and you have to destroy that target to poison adjacent units. That seems to restrict the primary target to low power units which aren't high value strategically to you and it's easily countered by just putting low value targets next to adjacent units. I don't know, maybe the card isn't as badly nerfed as I think it is but I didn't notice the changes and when I played the card I didn't get the result I expected so it seemed a bad nerf and I'm pretty sure I dropped the cards.

So, in short, in has always been clunky. But you got the changes a bit wrong - originally it was

Damage a unit by 2 and give it Poison.
Deathblow: Give adjacent units Poison.

then nerfed to

Poison an enemy unit. Deathblow: Damage units adjacent to it by 3.

(but that nerf happened in 2019 according to the database...seems what you are talking about here happened a long time ago)

and now it's

Damage an enemy unit by 3. Deathblow: Poison adjacent enemy units.

which is technically 1 more potential instance of poison than the previous iteration...might work fine with spies sandwitched between two high-value targets.

re Invo/Vincent, having a low value opponent card in your deck using Invo merely because it was very tall isn't ideal

But isn't terrible either. Especially because YenInvo was generally seen as a cheap-ish tall punish to use as the final play of the match more than anything.

And also because all that happened long before assimilate became a playable tag and before Braatens was introduced and Vigo buffed, so nobody played those in Ball decks - and therefore few people ever cared to try and use the "steal" aspect of it. Therefore, cluttering your deck in a patch that didn't have Coup de Grace+Joachim combo and million other tutors - they just hadn't been printed yet - didn't actually hinder you in any important way, because you couldn't even access you deck much after the initial draws and mulligans.

You would've only suffered from it if you'd used it in Round 1 (r2 was a drypass 99% of the time), and even then, an engine is an engine. Because it would definitely be an engine or maybe a tall unit, both of which you could probably put to use just fine (and only very rarely something else, like a hyperboosted Drone who's Doomed anyway).

But even when it was something else...that's too much of a rspecific case to seriously consider a downside of Invo. You'd need to use it r1 (unlikely) and on a tall card you can't use (also not super likely) and then get unlucky with either draws and by exactly 1 mulligan or Joachim if the stolen card was placed directly on top after you mulliganed it.

tl:dr: you would've needed to play suboptimally AND be mega unlucky for this stolen card to ruin your match.

and if the last consumption got rid of the poison status, I don't see what good Vincent is (having the GWENT card database is a big help when talking to you!). Not sure what you meant by "Instant 2x poison/Invo/Vincent". I don't see how you give poison status to a unit to use those two cards if the unit with such status has been consumed.

Masqurade ball triggered by Joachim into a Poison Fang/Van Murlehem Cupbearer or another aristocrat, for example. Literally every unit you could pull worked. Nowadays you can't do that, as Ball was nerfed to not be triggered by Disloyal units - precisely because it was such a broken combo. That's how you got 2 poisons on the same turn. Cooler yet, back when you could play Ball twice through Assire, you could use "instant poisoning" twice as well thanks to Roderick.

Invo doesn't require a status so it nuked that Barghest your opponent used to clean up an instance or even two of poison just fine, and Vincent could be saved for last, when they run out of consumes or, potentially, used in conjunction with Imposter which is also an instant combo.

And because Consume used this way transfers all the value your opponent gets into one or at most two super-tall units, and because you can realiably nuke the final stacked target in one turn, in the end you get even more removal value than if they didn't consume at all and all your poison went through, at the cost of either just Invo or Vincent or 2 additional simultaneous poisons, which is a small price compared to all the Consume instances they wasted trying to save their points.

If that sounds confusing, here's an example - let's suppose MO player consumed Yghern or, cooler yet, a tall unit that already consumed something with another Barghest to "save" it. Initially you lose 1 stack of poison, but for that you then get the sum value of Yghern, Barghest and the Consume deploy they wasted at the cost of 3 poisons and not 4 (2 of which have to be on the same turn, of course) or Invo or Vincent, which is already crazy good value. And that's if you decided to pull the trigger after the first Consume, which you shouldn't.

Now let's suppose you didn't - and your opponent is a bit of a dum-dum - they will keep eating poisoned targets again and again, stacking 40+ value on the final consumer which you will then instantly nuke in one of the three aforementioned ways

So in the end the it's just as if every unit that went into this monstosity (except for the last one) was killed by just 1 stack of poison....and what's more, they wasted a lot of perfectly good Consume triggers on nothing. That's literally the opposite of "countering".

tl;dr: Poisoning units A, B, C separely would take 6 instances of poison, but if A eats a poisoned B who ate a poisoned C you just need to kill off A, and you only need 2+2 instant ones (or 2+invo or 2+imposter+Vincent) to do that. So Invo used this way effectively replaces 4 stacks of poison, which is definitely way above its average value. It's a bit more iffy with Vincent, because you partially waste your leader ability, but get outstanding removal value in return, so it's still worth it.

I've been playing just to work the reward trees that I want for a while now. Getting the full set of cards would now be an objective of mine. It seems to me that some old decks would still work today, like those Nor Blue Stripes summons decks for a pointslam. When I'm doing Journey or Daily challenges I'll often play decks tailored for the task and occasionally those rubbish decks win or are competitive. Can't say that I've noticed Assimilate not being a potentially powerful deck. That was nerfed? I just thought that it went out of fashion without being a dud.

I wasn't talking about the recent abominable NG deck where only Terranova, Torturess and Braatens even had this tag (why the hell did we even call this archetype Assimilate?!).

No, I meant the original Assimilate, my man, the one you played with Portal, Ducal Guards, Diviners and probably Operator to spam the board with a bunch of bronze Assimilate engines. That was a thing of beauty, once, and has since gradually become unplayable (and some of those bronze engines were recently remade to fit into Soldier archetype, so R.I.P.). It worked a bit like modern-day Cultists, but was like 10x more fun.

I'm pretty sure I tried playing a Harmony deck when it first came out and it didn't seem that flash but then again, I'm not a technical player who uses spreadsheets to choose my units.

Commendable, and if everyone did that, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all because all the problems of the past decks I complained about would've been far less prominent. Alas, that's not how it actually went.

One bugbear of the new CT cards is the Nor low power unit which deals one damage every turn. Unlike the archer, they still deal damage without armour and countering them isn't something that can be done by an adaptable deck, as in you need to create a deck tailored to combat them but would no doubt be useless against other factions. During the Seasonal challenges some dominant decks made me want to tailor a deck to counter them but that hasn't generally been successful, as the end result seems to be where we are at now with the game as a whole...if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I.e. play the same deck. That's not where you want to be.

And that's exactly the reason people often hated on Nilfgaard so hard at certain points of the game's history. Other times...they hated out of habit or on principle

Someone had a post here about there being too many options for effects or something when it comes to an in-game choice. I argued that that philosophy should be applied, since it gives decks adaptability which could counteract any silly dev changes.

No, no, I agree. Diversity is good. With a small but super important caveat - anything requiring a highly specific counter can't be very strong - for the reasons I listed in the first paragraph of this post.

it's a coin toss as to whether you win or not, depending on whether you win the toss or how you draw.

Right? Right? So why then would you ever want certain decks to defeat certain other decks by default? Isn't it the same kind of lame?

Speaking of old decks, I used to hate that Ske unit which torched units when you played them...which became just that much more loveable when it was next to that unit which protected it from any damage you wanted to deal with it. It was pretty much an "I win" play by your opponent. Don't come across that much anymore.

Arnaghad+Sukrus combo. An abomination for sure, but it existed in a meta so toxic, it was never the main target of complaints... And by the way, I used to love Sukrus and played it with Artis long before self-wound Skellige received all these new cool units, but this, too, got powercrept by the end of 2020, I think - playing stuff like Olaf and Jutta became dangerous with all the cheap removal everyone got...and the points weren't even that good anymore, with all the insane new cards CDPR printed then.

That illustrates the problem I've mentioned before, in that do you really want to have to build a specific deck to counter a specific deck like this and which won't be good against other decks? Do you think GWENT has become more and more like this, as opposed to an earlier time, perhaps, where you could have a wide variety of decks which could play well against a wide variety of other decks?

I do think that.

Ideally, and I mentioned that a few times on this forum, I wanted Gwent where any deck that made sense (as in, built synergistically, had enough thinning for what it tried to achieve, a realistic gameplan etc.) could beat any other deck if piloted well. And...that's how it actually was, before Master Mirror. Not without some exceptions, but these exceptions were mostly memes (i.e. exceptionally bad against any decks that had evn the slightest means to disrupt the meme). Memes...and the Masquerade Ball that was far too good against far too many things. Hidden Cache Passiflora as well, but that one got nerfed super fast and super hard. Maybe @quintivarium is right and scenarios really were a mistake.


None of that is important anymore, of course, which is why I keep speaking in conditionals. Gwent will never be that perfect game we needed (but apparently not deserved).

 

[BartonFink]

None of that is important anymore, of course, which is why I keep speaking in conditionals. Gwent will never be that perfect game we needed (but apparently not deserved).

{Sorry about the formatting, I was a bit rushed but I do quote you sometimes in my reply.}

To get to the meat of the argument, are there actually any card games which aren't broken (eventually)? I used to play MTG on console. I really liked the Gareth deck or whatever it was called. It was just weak though. It seems to me that card games like this are like apps and social network websites...they are constantly 'improved' to the point where they become broken and can't be used anymore or you would not want to use them. That's what I was getting at with my earlier point about innovation vs being static. I like static. Can you imagine if the GWENT team got to update chess? You're white, you make your opening move, moving your pawn and...just as you do this, your queen is torched because your opponent had a unit in their graveyard which had the rule "Destroy your opponent's queen if their first move is with a pawn". How fun would that be?

You mention the psychological aspect to games like poker and rock, paper, scissors. Definitely for the former. But GWENT has that too. I like that. I'd rather lose a game because of psychology than because my opponent played a card which I have no answer for and if I did have a card to answer it, it would be a weak deck because its geared towards playing a specific kind of deck instead of being a good, all-round deck. The game often feels rigged in matchmaking. If my opponent plays a deck, they'll usually confirm my worst fears with what they play in response to me. E.g. the other day someone played that rare purifying unit which can purify every turn. Not that it changed the result but I pretty much had only my Ciri with resilience left to play. I wasn't suggesting GWENT be exactly like rock, paper, scissors but merely that some decks or factions have an edge over others. In what game would you have an exactly equal chance of beating any other opponent? None, I'd suggest.

Years ago on this board I suggested that surely CDPR could test decks and changes to it using simulations. I assume that they have computers. The way these expansions don't work it surprises me that it surprises the devs here that they have to nerf cards. Why can't they run millions of simulations in a day so that decks are roughly equal in effectiveness?

Maybe the devs here feel the need to put their 'mark' on the game, so they tend to spectacular effects, a la Michael Bay, rather than gameplay which won't require nerfs quickly.

Fargothwave said:

"How do I expect Syndicate to win in a war? The same way Ramsey Bolton beat Stannis".

Gosh, I haven't played any Witcher games yet! Was that a war? Being unconquered isn't the same thing as winning a war though, but that's a side-issue.

Your discussion on that double poison thing reminded me of a very simple way to do that...that unit with two doses of poison, one on deploy, one on order. That could deal with your opponent using consume or purify. Which brings me to the issue of simplicity. I like the saying about some games: easy to learn, how to master. The stuff you was saying about poison is just really complicated. You could relate it to my observation about things being 'improved' so much that it ends up being broken. That's another thing about these updates, it just adds more blah to things that you need to know. To make matters worse, the devs change cards often. So, I end up being surprised when I play Yrden expecting to wipe my opponent's boosts and...nothing of the sort happens. Why was Yrden nerfed? Because people who loved their endless growth decks hated it when he popped in to visit? Bizzare changes.

Fargothwave said:

"Right? Right? So why then would you ever want certain decks to defeat certain other decks by default? Isn't it the same kind of lame?".

Looping back, my earlier point in this post addressed that, re decks never really being equally matched against others. I did suggest last time that this 'edge' by certain decks could be countered to a degree with tweaks to your deck. However, my point on this is covered in my comment about running simulations of decks versus each other. Perhaps that way you really could have well-matched decks when humans play them. However, the dev design philosophy has tended to spectacle, so you get mechanics which don't gel well with each other...endless growth units with synergy, units with immunity etc. Immunity can be countered but at the cost of a good all-round deck.

So, I should probably add to my new thread here about what changes the community would want to make with the game the idea that decks should be made more rigid. A certain number of units would be required as well as special cards etc. Sure, it would be more boring but at least you wouldn't have expansion decks which are out of whack with previous decks. If tweaks were made, it would be to allow endless growth on one side of the board and strategy would come more into play.

One of my suggestions in that new thread of mine was matchmaking control. MTG had that ability but I would have liked it expanded. E.g. there are some fun factional decks in that which can be absolutely devastating against opponents but they're very slow decks. It would have made sense to be able to match slow decks versus decks.

Speaking of the ever expanding complexity of GWENT, I remember MTG having some puzzles to solve. Man, some of those were ridiculously obscure...I'm assuming that you'd need a Geralt level of knowledge on stuff in order to complete them. I used YouTube for some of the more obscure ones. Again, I think GWENT would be better if it was easy to learn but hard to master. I have no problem with cards being tricksy. E.g. playing a special card to destroy the highest unit but being surprised when one of your own units disappears. That's fun to experience on either side. You get that, "Oh, I see what happened there!" moment of realisation. GWENT is now just too big and clunky and it's improved way too much for its own good.

 

[Fargothwave]

wasn't suggesting GWENT be exactly like rock, paper, scissors but merely that some decks or factions have an edge over others. In what game would you have an exactly equal chance of beating any other opponent? None, I'd suggest.

Aight, we're on the same page then. Sure, type advantages should absolutely be the thing - just not the deciding factor like so many in Gwent's history.

Years ago on this board I suggested that surely CDPR could test decks and changes to it using simulations. I assume that they have computers. The way these expansions don't work it surprises me that it surprises the devs here that they have to nerf cards. Why can't they run millions of simulations in a day so that decks are roughly equal in effectiveness?

Maybe the devs here feel the need to put their 'mark' on the game, so they tend to spectacular effects, a la Michael Bay, rather than gameplay which won't require nerfs quickly.

That's pretty much how it went. I even cited Slama a couple of posts ago. Basically, yeah, they wanted "exciting" gameplay, completely disregarding the fact that the vast majority of Gwent players were there for number-crunching and not for the effortless 40-points point swings. Well, maybe those too, but only as some form of grand final play, not just two unconditional clicks.

Fargothwave said:

"How do I expect Syndicate to win in a war? The same way Ramsey Bolton beat Stannis".

Gosh, I haven't played any Witcher games yet! Was that a war? Being unconquered isn't the same thing as winning a war though, but that's a side-issue.

That's from Game of Thrones, though. That said, something of that sort happened in W3, too.

Your discussion on that double poison thing reminded me of a very simple way to do that...that unit with two doses of poison, one on deploy, one on order. That could deal with your opponent using consume or purify.

Maraal. But his order wasn't instant, so you could deny his second poison by doing something to him.

Which brings me to the issue of simplicity. I like the saying about some games: easy to learn, how to master. The stuff you was saying about poison is just really complicated. You could relate it to my observation about things being 'improved' so much that it ends up being broken. That's another thing about these updates, it just adds more blah to things that you need to know. To make matters worse, the devs change cards often. So, I end up being surprised when I play Yrden expecting to wipe my opponent's boosts and...nothing of the sort happens. Why was Yrden nerfed? Because people who loved their endless growth decks hated it when he popped in to visit? Bizzare changes.

Yrden, uh, is a terrible card, in that it just wins you the game against anything engine but doesn't do anything other times (so, another matchmaking coinflip), but hadn't been nerfed for so long precisely because it was a necessary evil in such an environment. Why they couldn't just nerf both? No idea.

Fargothwave said:

"Right? Right? So why then would you ever want certain decks to defeat certain other decks by default? Isn't it the same kind of lame?".

Looping back, my earlier point in this post addressed that, re decks never really being equally matched against others. I did suggest last time that this 'edge' by certain decks could be countered to a degree with tweaks to your deck. However, my point on this is covered in my comment about running simulations of decks versus each other. Perhaps that way you really could have well-matched decks when humans play them. However, the dev design philosophy has tended to spectacle, so you get mechanics which don't gel well with each other...endless growth units with synergy, units with immunity etc. Immunity can be countered but at the cost of a good all-round deck.

Or, you could simply go back in time and tell CDPR that breaking provisions-to-value ratio would be a lot of trouble down the line and they shouldn't do it. This way there would be no need for simulations or much testing, simply because every card of the same provision would have the same fixed and fair lower and upper limits of value with slight variiations, with cards with significantly higher limits involving more risk/skill. So, again, exactly how it was before MM.

So, I should probably add to my new thread here about what changes the community would want to make with the game the idea that decks should be made more rigid. A certain number of units would be required as well as special cards etc. Sure, it would be more boring but at least you wouldn't have expansion decks which are out of whack with previous decks. If tweaks were made, it would be to allow endless growth on one side of the board and strategy would come more into play.

Yeah, chief, that one would never work in Gwent. Limiting creativity of players in general proved to be a bad, bad decision many times in its history. Rather, the cards themselves should be balanced in the first place. It's not that hard. Literal 8-th grade math.

One of my suggestions in that new thread of mine was matchmaking control. MTG had that ability but I would have liked it expanded. E.g. there are some fun factional decks in that which can be absolutely devastating against opponents but they're very slow decks. It would have made sense to be able to match slow decks versus decks.

Such a queue can't be competitive/ranked, though. A separate ladder is an option, but defining main rank based on the results that you have forcefully excluded unfavorable matchups from...isn't really fair in any way.

Speaking of the ever expanding complexity of GWENT, I remember MTG having some puzzles to solve. Man, some of those were ridiculously obscure...I'm assuming that you'd need a Geralt level of knowledge on stuff in order to complete them. I used YouTube for some of the more obscure ones. Again, I think GWENT would be better if it was easy to learn but hard to master. I have no problem with cards being tricksy. E.g. playing a special card to destroy the highest unit but being surprised when one of your own units disappears. That's fun to experience on either side. You get that, "Oh, I see what happened there!" moment of realisation.

Yeah. And if I had my way, all removal cards but the weakest (and the most expensive ones) would be like that. Forget "removal", all the powerful cards would be like that. And the more reliable ones would be generally on the weaker side, to create this fun risk/reward dynamic where you can pick either stable or powerful, but not both and have to play around those poles

GWENT is now just too big and clunky and it's improved way too much for its own good.

Big and clunky, sure. Improved, not really. Even though there are many more cards and mechanics now, a much smaller amount is actually playable now than, say, 3 years ago, both in terms of absolute and relative numbers. Almost everything in your deckbuilder is dead weight.

 

[BartonFink]

Basically, yeah, they wanted "exciting" gameplay, completely disregarding the fact that the vast majority of Gwent players were there for number-crunching and not for the effortless 40-points point swings. Well, maybe those too, but only as some form of grand final play, not just two unconditional clicks.

How did you work out that the "vast majority" of Gwent players are number crunchers? Maybe I can be described as a casual player, so to see that in action I'd have to play a lot of ranked matches? I do seem to come across a variety of player types. Sometimes I get the impression that opponents insta-quit against me because what faction I'm playing and just assume that I have some sort of dominating meta. I don't! As for point swings, I wasn't a fan of Kolgrim and lately when I've come across him, he always has a defender to protect him. He has been nerfed though, although maybe with the new exponential growth available to the new cards, he needs to be unnerfed to make such decks competitive?

re Maraal, he was just an example of a simple mechanic to counter opponent's purifying your targets. When I tend to play him he's easy prey though, since the matchmaking system is rigged to always match me with opponents who have me covered and always draw better than me.

Yrden, uh, is a terrible card, in that it just wins you the game against anything engine but doesn't do anything other times (so, another matchmaking coinflip), but hadn't been nerfed for so long precisely because it was a necessary evil in such an environment. Why they couldn't just nerf both? No idea.

Isn't Yrden OG? I'm assuming he always had that deploy ability until recently. Which reminds me, where did you go to get that info about the changes to Puffball? Wouldn't mind having access to the source of info like that. Whenever I've played Igni my opponents always have the ability to make only one unit on their side the tallest. Because the game is rigged that way. I really feel that I should be playing Yrden a lot with these new cards but haven't gotten around to it and the nerf makes it look a liability. Weird to nerf that card. If they nerfed the Michael Bay exponential growth engines you wouldn't need to pack Yrden. Just goes to show how the devs think. In other words, Yrden is an even more 'necessary evil' in the current state of play, and that's unnerfed too.

Or, you could simply go back in time and tell CDPR that breaking provisions-to-value ratio would be a lot of trouble down the line and they shouldn't do it. This way there would be no need for simulations or much testing, simply because every card of the same provision would have the same fixed and fair lower and upper limits of value with slight variiations, with cards with significantly higher limits involving more risk/skill. So, again, exactly how it was before MM.

What's MM? You never did get around to answering my last question about whether there are CTG which aren't broke. Maybe you liked pre-MM Gwent because it was broken to your liking? I still like my idea of using simulations to test cards and decks. Wonder why they don't do it as it can't be that complicated, you'd think.

Yeah, chief, that one would never work in Gwent. Limiting creativity of players in general proved to be a bad, bad decision many times in its history. Rather, the cards themselves should be balanced in the first place. It's not that hard. Literal 8-th grade math.

By "rigid", I just meant some general, formulaic features of deck building. Perhaps it could be along the lines of you getting to choose a certain number of units from a certain number of tiers and the same for special cards. Wonder if things like not having a deck made exclusively of units should be a thing too. When the community is in charge, there will be a chance for creativity. With some constraints on mods, perhaps there could be some interesting 'new' special cards say which can vary effects in useful ways. E.g. varying a 6 point damage card to have a variant which maybe damages an opponent by 3 and boosts one of your own units by 3 or some other set of 'split' effects like that.

Such a queue can't be competitive/ranked, though. A separate ladder is an option, but defining main rank based on the results that you have forcefully excluded unfavorable matchups from...isn't really fair in any way.

Is Pro Rank going to be a thing when the community takes over? I feel cheated by CDPR because I fulfilled the gameplay requirements of obtaining that rank but it wasn't give to me. Still feel bitter about that typical CDPR bs 'logic'. Had a thread on that here ages ago. Anyway, sure, exclude personalised matchmaking for ranked games. On the unranked mode you can come across players with decks that just smash you, like they're using a top tier ranked deck on you. On MTG you could see the players in the lobby and you could avoid players who always smashed you. The game did have a ranking system but I can't remember how that worked. Occasionally You'd find a player who you matched well with and it could be fun playing against them and mixing up what decks you played against them. I supposed the ability to chat with them could be useful, as in suggesting that you both play slow decks each other but I never found that practical and there's the obstacle of typing using a controller which is a pain in the arse. Gwent has the stupid, gamified GG system and the other substitute for real player interaction, the leader taunts system. Extremely rarely I've had players abuse that and I'd mute them.

Yeah. And if I had my way, all removal cards but the weakest (and the most expensive ones) would be like that. Forget "removal", all the powerful cards would be like that. And the more reliable ones would be generally on the weaker side, to create this fun risk/reward dynamic where you can pick either stable or powerful, but not both and have to play around those poles

Easy to learn, hard to master for me. The new abilities just adds to the sum of knowledge you need to learn to play effectively and I really can't be arsed doing that. Maybe those new abilities are some sort of IQ test for nerds but they're nowhere near as fun as those language based tricksy cards that you read as working in a certain way and when they don't, you feel cheated by them but then realise that they're just doing what they say do. That's a sort of IQ test and you don't have to constantly learn about new abilities etc.

Big and clunky, sure. Improved, not really. Even though there are many more cards and mechanics now, a much smaller amount is actually playable now than, say, 3 years ago, both in terms of absolute and relative numbers. Almost everything in your deckbuilder is dead weight.

By "improved", I was referencing my comment about apps and websites being improved so much that they break. Do you have that happen to a lot? Something needs to be updated for 'improvements' and it bricks your whatever and breaks it? I'm wondering if the provision cap has been lifted recently. Just an impression that it may have been.

A while ago I asked a question on this board about contracts and skins. Maybe you know the answer? I'll try and find a link to this and add it below.

Where do I post a question about not being able to use skins?

I.e. when choosing to pick a leader, I see that some options have one or two skins seemingly available to choose but when you choose them, the choice won't save. I've asked this question here some weeks ago [...]. So, where do I post this question? I'll give more details once I know where to...

forums.cdprojektred.com

My question on contracts concerned the "Choose your poison" contract. I'm wondering if that was limited to a certain event or time as I've met the criteria many times over and it still hasn't dropped. From memory, a contract with the same criteria except needing more wins was unlocked by me, which makes this one not unlocking passing strange.

And it's nice to finally see how the quotation system works here (I was doing it the hard way until today). Hopefully I won't forget but then again I haven't been a regular on these boards for a very long time until recently.